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About the Author
THE SOUTHERN MYSTIQUE
Howard Zinn
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Atlanta is in the Deep South. Atlanta has as many crackpots, KKK sympathizers, country wool-hats, white supremacists, barbershop lynchers, vicious policemen as any Southern city. If the Deep South said “Never,” Atlanta, too, said “Never.” In 1958 it was tightly segregated. By 1963: the buses had desegregated; so had the public libraries, the rail and bus terminals, a number of theaters and restaurants downtown, the department store cafeterias, the opera, the municipal auditorium, the legitimate theater, the public schools, the colleges (public and private), several hotels, the plainclothes squad of the Police Department, the Fire Department, the baseball team, the tennis courts, the parks, the golf courses, the public swimming pools, the Chamber of Commerce, several professional organizations, the county committee of the Democratic Party, and even the Senate of the Georgia General Assembly!
These are all tokens, in relation to the total need, but they suggest what is possible. And now that they are won, obvious explanations can be advanced with great casualness: a flexible city administration, a layer of Negro intellectuals, a determined student movement willing to engage in civil disobedience, a band of white liberals who give a cosmopolitan salting to the country-style Talmadge ham. But none of this takes account of the fact that all the above forces are a minority of the population; that most of Atlanta’s population, the overwhelming majority of its 350,000 white people, still consider Negroes inferior and prefer a segregated society; and that all these people could have prevented most of the change—by riot, by election, by boycott—if they had cared enough. They stood by passively and accepted, with the puniest resistance, a series of important changes in the sociolegal structure of the city.
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